


More than One and Less than Three

by RoseWithAllHerThorns



Category: The Order of the Stick
Genre: Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 19:22:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16204028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseWithAllHerThorns/pseuds/RoseWithAllHerThorns
Summary: On their way to gather more gold so they can resurrect Durkon as quickly as possible, Vaarsuvius and Belkar stumble across a strange magic column.





	More than One and Less than Three

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thethirdseventh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thethirdseventh/gifts).



> “Well, we’re off to loot ancient artifacts again.”
> 
> “That was another campaign.”
> 
> “Oh, right.”

 “I still don’t see why we’re going all the way out here to rob someone.”

“You haven’t managed to forget about Master Thundershield’s demise already, have you?”

“Not that!” Surprisingly, Belkar aborted the rude gesture he was making in favor of throwing his hands up in the air. “If we had to loot a dusty old temple full of ash and corpses, we had one _right there_. It’s crazy that we’re trekking all this way out just to find another one.”

Vaarsuvius squints down at the path. “He wouldn’t want to be resurrected with the spoils from his own religion’s temple,” they remind both Belkar and themselves. It’s a lot less satisfying than a good harsh rant would be, but even now, agreeing with Belkar gives an odd, uneven feeling.

“What about that other thing, where people give us stuff for killing the people they want dead! The uh,” Belkar has the right words for it, brute muscle, assassination, murders and bounties, but he’s practicing with the terms “reasonable” people use. “The reward for clearing their place out of all those bloodthirsty assholes.”

“They gave Sir Greenhilt a reward for it. It’s just not enough, even if we can find someone to resurrect him out of the goodness of their heart on such short notice.”

“That asshole. Roy never tells me these things!” Belkar complains, and then instead of complaining more loudly and bitterly, squints at Vaarsuvius. “Are you trying to rub that “trust and respect thing” in my face?”

Vaarsuvius smiles at nothing in particular. “Anyone who hasn’t botched their observation roll would have noticed that months ago. But no, I did not bring that up solely to rub the benefits of my sometimes-ignored Wisdom or Alignment in your face. I simply thought that you should know that the amount of gold we need to bring our favored cleric back into this world is smaller than it originally was.”

“Thank god. He’s been dead for way too long already, that-” and the curses that follow are incomprehensible, even to elven ears.

“True Seeing.” Vaarsuvius looks through the temple carefully for magical traps to ensnare their mind. Belkar throws a rock down the hall, watching it skip loudly down until it hits the back with a thud.

“Just tell me when you find something, I guess.”

…

They find a hoard, guarded from previous looters by some monster, but it’s vulnerable to being stabbed, disintegrated, and lit on fire. Typical.

“Do you think this dude’s horns would make a nice helmet, or does it detract too much from the my Sexy Halfling mystique?”

“Well, it covers most of your face, so I cannot help but note the improvement. You should keep it.”

That’s exactly the right thing to say to make him throw it off, apparently, wiping the blood off his buzz cut with another hand.

Vaarsuvius notices a pedestal near the back, ornate and fancy enough that they’d put even odds on it being something really important or some kind of stupid distraction. They drift towards it, and the closer they get the more complex it looks, with two crystal orbs and a number of steps leading up to it.

By the top step it looks like their options would be to crouch or to kneel, so Vaarsuvius stops a step below, fingers idling just above some paint that looks very much like handprints.

“This looks like divination magic.” They circle around, noting another pair of handprints. Maybe this place was made for a race with four hands. But more likely, it was made for two people to use. It says ‘to show the presents’ path.’

They weigh their options, and eventually turn towards Belkar, who is stuffing the treasure into his mysteriously limitless pockets next to Blackwing, who has made a hobby out of burrowing into it like some kind of mole. Gold pieces’ ability to be both heavy and light is rather astounding, in its own way.

“Halfling!” Vaarsuvius calls from across the chamber. “This spell requires two sets of hands to activate!”

“And are we going to do that?” Belkar’s fistfuls of gold grow slower, eventually just stuffing his hands into his pants.

“If it reveals a secret passage with more treasure, this might be the last trip we make of this nature.” It might be anyways, but even if Haley can convince the shopkeepers to buy all the strange things in here for a fortune, not all shopkeepers have that much money.

“Works for me.”

There’s another inscription on it. “To show the beholder’s past, and to change it.”

“What?”

“That’s what it says.”

“That’s freaky.”

“There is a chance this magical artifact will merely make us think the past proceeded differently,” Vaarsuvius muses to themselves, looking at the less obvious runes laid along the side of the stone.

“I mean, I can think of plenty of memories I’d pay for someone to rip out of my head. Not all of them, but y’know. Life.”

Vaarsuvius puts their hands on the part on the side that talks about the present not long after Belkar puts his on. The crystal swirls ominously, like some cloud is forming inside.

“I can think of many things I should have done differently, but it’s too late to change them now.”

“Yeah, _doing_ is definitely a problem. It’s usually funny, but sometimes you get these beer googles and-”

Vaarsuvius shudders, in a way that’s really not as subtle as they’d prefer, and the scene shifts.

They’re in a city that’s extremely blue now, and their mouth tastes like beer they never drank, and there’s a halfling there, seemingly dead to the world. It clips out just as suddenly, and the world is back to the chamber and the halfling and the sweet taste of nothing but their own salivia.

Belkar looks queasy too, but not embarrassed. “Ugh. I need to remember that just because I stole it fair and square doesn’t mean I need to drink it all in one sitting.” Their hands are off it now, as are his. “What, is this just a vomit machine? Lame.”

Vaarsuvius hasn’t learned to quit when they’re ahead. They want to see what this column does, so they slot their hands against the stone again and think about Inkyrius, the last day they ever saw them. Maybe they’ll see what their former mate has been up. Maybe it’ll just retread that same dark minute.

But the vividness of the memory in their head doesn’t transfer to their mind, with the smell and sound and feel of borrowed power arcing through their veins. Nor are they transported to another place.

Instead they’re brought back to an older event, sitting at a table turning the Boots of Elvenkind inside out, to make sure they’re not infused with some other kind of enchantment. Five sets of eyes are on them now, done with the disposal of the treasure and ready to move on to the magical items.

Belkar hops up, setting his chin a little higher than the table, and stares Vaarsuvius down. “Okay, what’s happening here? Why would you want to change this?”

“I don’t want to change it at all. In fact, I’m not sure why we’re here.”

“Uh, maybe it’s some Boots of Forgetfulness?” Haley volunteers.

“Oh man, that happens to me every time I walk into a different room,” Elan sighs.

Vaarsuvius takes their hands way from it, and just like that the vision is gone, complete with a fully-lucid halfling blinking up at them from across the stone they used to be touching.

“I just experienced some kind of vision, or flashback, from what just happened,” they said.

“You too? Ugh.” Belkar shakes his head.

“I also experienced another vision, but it seems that you were too drunk to remember it. A mercy for which I am very thankful.”

Belkar rolls his eyes, and Vaarsuvius puts their hands down on the stone again.

They’re treated to a familiar view of a muskrat scrabbling on Belkar’s feet, hoisting itself almost to the height of his knee and jumping enthusiastically at his calf, and it’s even funnier the second time around.

Belkar doesn’t keep screaming this time, sadly. He picks it up and gives them a look that makes Vaarsuvius more certain than usual that he wants to be able to kill anyone he looks at with the sheer force of his hate.

He usually just uses his daggers for that.

This time the scene ends without Vaarsuvius removing their hands or walking away, with Belkar having backed away from the stone column. “What’s that all about, you androgynous shit-carter?” he demands, and Vaarsuvius almost doesn’t want to explain it.

But the urge to show how much they know strikes again.

“It appears that this column will allow the users to relive any memory from their past, as long as they both experienced it.” It’s a nitpicky limitation, but a surprising one.

Belkar taps his foot. “Is it just me, or do you remember Elan making a lot of jokes about his Elven Boots of Forgetfulness?”

Vaarsuvius can remember that, although before they were only significant as the option that Roy preferred over his bag of animals. And maybe as a early warning that Elan would do something that they perceived as making fun of wizardry but was really caused by his admiration of Vaarsuvius.

“It does seem to change things, or at least fill in our memories with things that might have happened if things had progressed the way we chose.”

Maybe they could go back and relive all the battles they’d lost, when Belkar had decided to go and fight someone instead of staying and protecting them like he’d been supposed to. Maybe they could tell Shojo or Hijo in advance that Xykon was coming for them.

Maybe they could just walk away from the Incident that was Belkar getting drunk enough to kiss them.

“I vote we go and win at least five lotteries.”

“I can’t recall us entering any towns that had either lotteries or records of who won in them.”

“Maybe we can just walk towards one? We don’t really know the limitations of this thing.”

That’s true.

“We might be able to give our past selves advice, but that would involve me choosing to trust you over my own judgement.”

“I might have gone to a lottery if you reminded me one existed, you don’t know that.”

“But would you have chosen to purchase the one I suggested?”

“Probably not. Or you could just pretend you made up some kind of spell. Summon Winning Ticket. Honestly, that’d be hilarious. Just me, a bag full of riches, and your own weird charade to keep up.”

Vaarsuvius thinks about what they regret the most again.

But their past self would never take that kind of advice against magic and demons from an evil halfling, or probably even kept some of the more esoteric kinds of advice they can think of in mind.

“Let’s start with something simple and important to test its limits,” Vaarsuvius says.

Belkar seems to be thinking something over. “Should we keep Shojo alive?”

“What?” That’s not a phrase that Vaarsuvius expected to come out of his mouth any time soon.

“You know, the guy in charge of all the paladins in Azure City before that bitch killed him. That dude.”

“No, I remember him very clearly. But Shojo’s death is immaterial to the reasons why Azure City fell to begin with.”

“I don’t know, everyone bitched enough about it while I was there.”

Vaarsuvius trusts Hijo, as annoying as they found him back in the day, but they can’t say the same for Shojo.

“Let’s stick to something more direct for the first try. Let’s try to stay behind after the audience with him and tell him about Xykon’s march.”

“Why bother to stay behind instead of just saying it quickly?”

“No one but us will remember the events from a future which hasn’t yet happened. If we seem to be making up something, it won’t seem very trustworthy.”

“Eh, it’d probably make more sense coming from you, some overpowered elf who doesn’t want to give up their arcane secrets even when they have vital information. Or me, maybe knowing some guy who knows some guy who spotted their army getting supplies.”

“Nonetheless, I suspect if we’re separated the vision will end.”

They look bleakly across the table at each other, counting down the hours until the temple is destroyed for some plot-convenient reason, and realizing that they’ll have to agree with each other to do anything with it.

Then they return their hands to the table, and the past shifts.


End file.
